Like Two in a Million, Like Once in a Life

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Ah, that’s just a fandom shorthand. Their names sound similar to the numbers in Japanese.

“go” = 5“kyu” = 9

so gokudera becomes 59.

“ro” = 6“kyu” = 9

so rokudo mukuro’s number is 69.

“tsu” = 2“na” = 7

so tsunayoshi becomes 27. this is also why natsu’s number would logically be 72, but no one really writes any ship fics for natsu, since he’s a pet. 72 is mostly used for hyper dying will tsuna, since he’s the opposite of regular tsuna. so if you see a pairing for 2772, that’s tsuna and hyper dying will tsuna (which i’ve personally always found weird).

as you can imagine, there is some overlap, so the fandom has gotten pretty creative over the years, like with yuni (her name means one in latin, so her number is 01).

And of course, there are some characters who don’t have numbers. In order to fit the theme of the rest of the shorthands, they’ve been given letters 

(like D for Dino, X for Xanxus. you’d think G would be for G, but they gave that letter to Giotto because he’s more popular i guess. i forget what they use for G. i think maybe people just used the same letter for both of them and then in fics you’d figure out which one they were talking about by context)

for some characters though, people use just shortened versions of their name instead of their numbers (like i had no idea that 5666 was the number for colonello and lal, since everyone calls them cololal). you can especially see this for the arcobaleno and varia.

though i’m not gonna lie, i don’t know if the fandom on ao3 still does this, given i’ve gotten pretty disconnected from the khr fandom unfortunately. could be they’ve started going the easy way of mashing together the characters’ names.